• @[email protected]
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    221 day ago

    Hold on, hold on, don’t lump Ireland in with the colonists, they were over here taking what didn’t belong to them long before they made it to India…

      • @[email protected]
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        514 hours ago

        Yeah, good point! The sun never set on the… Irish empire? And all those countries around the world that celebrate independence from Ireland. And gaelige, that worldwide language, spoken in all the former colonies. The Irish museums, full of antiquities rescued from the locals around the world.

        They’re really just a shower of bastards with good PR!

        • @[email protected]
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          110 hours ago

          Well at least a good few of them went off to colonize America. And didn’t give that one back, either, unlike India and friends.

    • @Worx
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      119 hours ago

      You could say the same for Wales and Scotland too

      • @[email protected]
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        315 hours ago

        Basically it’s all on the French. Us lowly Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t have gone taking over someone else’s country

        • @Worx
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          314 hours ago

          And uh, how did the Angles and Saxons get here when the Celts were already living here? It’s probably all the Roman’s fault for setting a precedent

  • @[email protected]OPM
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    241 day ago

    Explanation: Britain, at one point, managed to leverage itself into a position of control over all of India. In part, this was because the India-based Mughal Empire, one of the wealthiest and most powerful countries on the face of the earth, chose to fall apart at a very inopportune time, splitting India into a hundred different opposing states just as the Brits started sniffing around for colonial concessions.

    The other reason is that the Brits REALLY wanted that newfangled tea - first by routing trade from China through the British East India Company, and then by growing tea directly in India itself in the 19th century.

    • @[email protected]
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      13 hours ago

      This is a very timely post as I’ve been listening to The Steam House by Jules Vern on LibriVox and it takes place in mid-19th century India having been written in the late-19th century and has entire chapters and passages devoted to the history of Indian colonization to give context. It’s also neat because the book imagines RVs long before RVs were invented and characters correctly predict future technological advances that were still 30-50 years off at the time the book was published

    • @[email protected]
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      181 day ago

      Actually it started with spices, like black pepper.

      Then they came with guns and did the “divide and rule” thing, by letting the kings fight each other.

      • @[email protected]OPM
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        71 day ago

        It highlights the entire subcontinent, but I think even considering that, you’re right, the population was considerably less.